2003 “Cell Life and Death, Child Life and Death: Genomic Horizons, Genetic Disease, Family Stories” In Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, eds.2003. Remaking Life and Death. School of American Studies Press, 129-164.

Current News/Projects

Updated June 2017

For the last decade, Faye Ginsburg and I have pursued research and writing project the rising pubic presence and consciousness of disability as an aspect of US culture since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Initially funded by the Spencer Foundation and NYU’s Institute for the Study of Human Development and Social Change, we later received support from NYU’s Humanities Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to our joint work among family, media, legal, and educational innovators in this growing sector, I am now conducting fieldwork in scientific laboratories on brain research about learning, memory, childhood cognitive, emotional, ad behavioral diagnoses and epigenetics. Of course, kinship relations lie at the heart of our project, and we are interviewing families across a wide array of social locations who have had the experience of having a child diagnosed with special educational categories and services. Now, aging out of the public education system into a transition to adulthood makes the life course of disability a compelling locus of investigation. We see this as a particularly promising arena for understanding unanticipated cultural activism around gender, racial-ethnic, class and kinship claims on citizenship. Our fieldwork concerns the rise of disability consciousness. We argue for an explicitly anthropological perspective on the growing public awareness and mediated diversity of “All Kinds of Minds” (to quote a famous and popular book on the subject) in U.S. families and communities. One of my contributions to this research involves intensive fieldwork at a pediatric neuroscience laboratory, where theories about childhood ADHD, Learning Disabilities, Autism Spectrum Disorders and other conditions are increasingly being folded into collaborations to produce “Big Data” on “Small Kids”.